3 Ways To Drive Adoption Right Now

It’s no secret that successful adoption plays a huge role in customer retention rates. As a CSM, improving product adoption should be a top priority for you in order to ensure your customers’ long-term success. Here are 3 proven methods you can use right now to encourage customers, both new and old, to use your product more effectively. Let's get started!

Talk Things Out

Start at a place that’s familiar. Talk to your customers, don’t hide from them. Providing open communication by asking instead of making educated guesses or debating will work out in your favor in the long run. Sometimes we might not realize that we are overwhelming customers with an influx of information that’s not specific enough. New users usually sign up with the goal of accomplishing something specific. It’s no surprise that most of them don’t know exactly how to reach that goal using your product without effective coaching. Creating visual walkthroughs will accelerate your customers’ understanding of your product and help them reach the “Wow” moment in a shorter timespan. As a CSM, the first 90-days are the perfect opportunity to start influencing your customer’s outcomes. Your customers look to you for guidance, so talk to them and learn from them.

Walk A Mile In Their Shoes

Think of it like this; when you first sign up for your own product, what do you see on the welcome screen? Are there in-app messages and tips to guide you through the next step? Take a moment to think about the last time you viewed your product from the customer standpoint. Every so often, signup and log in as a customer. You’ll need to ask yourself questions like: is the information presented confusing? Are there too many first steps offered at one? How accessible is product guidance? Then, target specific stages of the adoption journey and truly hone in on the customer experience, step by step.

For instance, we correlate strong adoption for Amity users with their usage of the account explorer and their ability to drill down on multiple profiles to see support tickets and engagements. Because we know this, we focus heavily on step-by-step in-app guides around that feature during onboarding. We make sure to be proactive with announcements and we share helpful information that can help our customers fully benefit from that feature as early as possible. Not only that, in-app messages can even be utilized to congratulate customers when they accomplish and reach important milestones.

Provide Incentives

Keep in mind one of the key factors in adoption; Trialability. It lets customers experiment the software without having to tie the knot forever, hence the perceived risk of signing up drops significantly. Providing your customers with a great experience at this stage helps to reduce the time spent on adoption, and it increased your chances of creating brand ambassadors. The greater the trialability, the quicker the adoption.

If your company doesn’t provide trials, not to worry! Providing incentives in the form of ‘points’ for ‘challenges’ and getting customers to learn about your product is yet another stellar way to influence adoption. For instance, Uberflip does this with the Uberflip A-list, where they invite customers to gain points and redeem rewards as they complete onboarding. In doing so, not only do they increase product knowledge but also help inspire loyalty from their customers early on.

Personalize Your Approach

The ultimate outcome to work towards is driving as much engagement as possible when customers are early on in their journey. As a CSM, you need to be proactive and engage with your customers on a personal level. Getting your user’s attention doesn’t have to be flashy or over the top, simplicity is key. Including a subtle link underneath your signature about new features that they haven’t yet tried is a great way of driving product adoption. You’re not spamming their inboxes but still getting their attention. It’s a win-win.

In short, getting your customers to adopt your product quickly doesn’t have to be a long and complicated process, as long as you’re driving product awareness and genuinely capturing their interest.

About the Author

Asra Sarfraz is currently the Digital Marketing Intern at Amity. When she is not consuming barrels of coffee, she is busy photographing and designing new projects.